I currently have a large number of projects with a complex dependency structure being developed by 50+ developers using Maven 2/3 with Nexus and Jenkins. We develop at a fast pace and more often that not we build and deploy releases with SNAPSHOT dependencies. Most of the time we cannot wait for one team or another to build a release version before we have to deploy. Due to this we have had a number of issues with bugs and works-in-process entering production and having no idea what changes are in those SNAPSHOTS.
What I am looking to do is to eliminate SNAPSHOTS and move to automatic releases with the versions-maven-plugin and to implement a release Staging policy.
And here in lays the problem. For developers and for the CI build it needs to be configured to resolve dependencies from "Staging" and "Release" and publish ONLY to "Staging". We then want to be able to "Promote" that build as a release, re-building it to resolve dependencies from "Release" and publish to "Release" (initially this will be a manual promotion but we may wish to automate this also). Does this all sound reasonable?
I do not want to use the maven-release-plugin because we have tried to use this before and we don't like the fact that it modifies the pom automatically and makes changes in our scm, triggering more builds.
Also, is there even a way to tell maven to use one repository for resolving and another to publish to? Could I do this with gradle?
Any comments/ideas on this would be greatly appreciated.
I recommend not to use the maven release plugin and not to use snapshots. Look at here to release in a fast and clean way.